Departures: this stylish gay love story deftly balances darkness and whimsy
In her 1998 essay What’s a Good Gay Film?, film critic B. Ruby Rich considered what queer audiences were looking for.
She wrote that queer cinema-goers were seeking “films of validation and a culture of affirmation: work that can reinforce identity, visualise respectability, combat injustice and bolster social status”. They were tired, she argued, of stereotypes of queer suffering and trauma. Instead, they required “nothing downbeat or too revelatory; and happy endings, of course”.
But if a straightforward happy ending is what you are after, Departures is not the film for you. This miraculously self-financed and stylish debut feature is not purely affirmative. At times, the screen shimmers with sadness. And yet, wryly and playfully, the film also resists becoming gloomy. Tonally sophisticated, it combines the bleak with the whimsical, ultimately sidestepping the crude dichotomy of happy or unhappy endings altogether.
The film opens with a love-scarred Benji (played by the film’s writer and co-director Lloyd Eyre-Morgan) recalling a recent relationship. In flashback, he remembers meeting handsome Jake (David Tag) in the airport as they both wait for a flight to Amsterdam. Jake bewilders Benji: his flirtation is suggestive but always deniable, never quite declaring itself. Charismatic and assertive, Jake engineers it so that they sit together on the flight, telling the air steward that he is Benji’s carer – a description which quickly becomes grimly ironic.
Later, Jake rejects the suggestion that he is gay but demands that Benji give him a blowjob regardless. Monthly trips to Amsterdam follow and the two men develop a form of intimacy, but one which affords the softer, more pliable Benji little power.
In such a brief synopsis, the scenario risks sounding cliched. Familiar narrative devices pile up: the physically asymmetrical gay relationship in which the self-consciousness of one man makes them susceptible to the coercive manipulations of the more assured partner in a whirlwind of sex and drugs and emotional control. A comparable dynamic played out in another recent queer film, Pillion.
Benji, longing for this to be more than a once-monthly dose of overseas sex, withstands put-downs and disappointments. His quiet, emotional expressions of desire (played movingly by Eyre-Morgan) contrast with Jake’s struggle to accept his attraction to men. Tag is excellent and his portrayal of Jake is sometimes harsh and defensive, but also shows vulnerability, which prevents him from becoming a one-dimensional monster. Because of these tensions, the relationship’s unhappy ending feels like a dead cert.
Lessons from Heartstopper
Departures takes familiar cliches and gives them new life, turning them into something unexpectedly revealing. Its understated story recalls many films about gay suffering – from A Single Man to All of Us Strangers – but it refuses to stay within that familiar emotional frame.
Instead, the film disrupts expectations through bold, stylised touches that feel borrowed, perhaps improbably, from the Heartstopper playbook. The result is a work that plays with recognisable influences while twisting them into something more strange, lively and original.
Heartstopper, the popular Netflix queer teen drama, deliberately avoids the more difficult or painful stories often told about queer life. Instead, it offers the kind of wish-fulfilling, happy endings that Rich suggested many queer viewers have long desired. Every glance, touch and kiss between its characters is punctuated with playful on-screen doodles — bursts of electricity, fluttering butterflies and swirling text that insist we are watching Love with a capital L.
Departures borrows these same twee, saccharine stylistic gestures, but uses them in a very different context. Applied to a darker, sometimes even sordid story about control and sadness, they take on a mischievous, unsettling edge.
As Benji’s voiceover details his suffering, scratchy lettering and illustrations dance around the screen. When he first sees Jake and his weary voiceover acknowledges the pain to come, doodled hearts burst around the handsome stranger to the music of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. As Benji submissively performs oral sex for Jake, the Hallelujah Chorus plays and animated fireworks fill the screen. And as Jake prepares to get into a fight with Benji’s friends, the needle of a Toxic Masculinity Meter shoots up to maximum. Here is a version of Heartstopper for an audience which knows that happy endings are often only the stuff of comic books.
In Departures, the collision of the sombre, unsettling narrative with the comic stylings of those twitching onscreen graphics suggests a more complex emotional situation in which neither cynicism nor romanticism is left unchecked. Instead, they synthesise in a complex portrait of Benji, who can neither maintain nor give up his romantic belief that Jake might love him.
Colliding styles
One of the film’s most striking ways of expressing this tension comes in a series of non-narrative sequences. Here, the characters dance – or perhaps merely convulse – under harsh strobe lights, their bodies flickering in and out of view, shifting into new poses and even seeming to become different selves between flashes.
It’s a simple but powerful device, inspired by the club scenes the men encounter on their trips to Amsterdam. Yet it opens up something more unsettling: brief glimpses of gay men caught between pleasure and pain, ecstasy and distress, moving to the uncertain rhythm of a contemporary queer world where nothing quite feels stable or fixed.
In the 1990s, Rich rejected the idea of easy affirmation, describing herself instead as an “old-time outlaw girl” who craved films “that push the edge, upset convention, defy expectation, speak the unspeakable, grab me by the throat and surprise me with something I’ve never seen before”.
Departures may work with familiar characters and a recognisable story, but its force lies in how it collides styles and tones in unexpected ways. It’s the kind of film that, in Rich’s terms, grabs you by the throat. What stays with me most is its sardonic yet romantic energy and the strangely undefeated presence of Benji at its centre.
This film deserves to find an audience who want more than easy viewing. It deserves viewers who will dance along to its tonal shifts and cherish the funny, sad, ironic almost-happy ending it serves up in its closing credits.
Benedict Morrison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.